text: He was born in Stavanger as a son of businessperson Endre Qvie Berner, Sr. (1853–1925) and his wife Anna Marie Gjemre (1875–1958). He worked at a workshop after finishing middle school, and enrolled in machinery studies at Bergen Technical School in 1911, but switched to chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1913. He graduated in 1918, and was then hired as research assistant of his advisor Claus Nissen Riiber. In 1922 he was promoted to docent. He studied in Munich (with Richard Willstätter and Heinrich Otto Wieland) in 1922–1923 and 1928, and in Birmingham (with Walter Haworth) in 1929. He took the doctorate in 1926 with the thesis A Contribution to the Thermochemistry of Organic Compounds.